laissez les bons temps rouler

I don't know if anyone is still around who remembers What is Lost, my first Star Wars AU from 2007 -- yeah, 2007! Star Wars is definitely a fandom I bounce in and out of over the years -- but I've got some scenes from the unwritten sequel that I've been sitting on for the past six years that I finally went ahead and put up on AO3. Besides these two scenes -- the two alternate beginnings for the sequel, which was originally called "A Long Time Gone" -- I've actually got another 10K of miscellaneous scenes, since this was back when I did a lot of what I call concept writing, rather than banging through the way I usually do now. (Somewhere in my room, I'm sure I have the notebook that has the stuff I didn't type up, which is from the third story in that series, but I have no idea where. I have dozens of notebooks in my room.)

According my six year old notes for this story, A Long Time Gone originally introduced Padme, Luke, Leia, Quinlan Vos, Aayla Secura, Han Solo, and Chewbacca in the Lostverse. It took up a few weeks after What is Lost ended and revolved around Anakin teaming up with Padme and Obi-Wan to rescue Leia (raised Leia Naberrie), who had been taken by Palpatine to be trained as a Dark Jedi. The third story would have taken place nine years later (the approximate timeline of ANH) and involved Anakin being recruited for the Rebellion by Luke and Leia, if I remember correctly. (My notes for this story are missing.)

And it's DONE! No, seriously, the story is complete as is; I didn't leave anything hanging that wasn't done deliberately and it doesn't end in the middle of a sentence or a scene the way some of my other UFOs have. Further notes at the end about the AU, what would have happened next (Water was conceived as the first in an increasingly cracky trilogy), and what probably happened before.

I have been threatening this for the better part of three years now; it's time to man up and admit that the chances I'll ever actually give Water the complete rewrite it deserves are slim to none. So! The quick backstory: Be Like Water is a genderfuck girl!Peter AU of PC; I wrote the first 50K for NaNo 2008 and the next 18K a couple months later, then sent it out to beta and never did the edits. After three years, I'm reasonably certain that it's never going to get the edits it deserves, especially since I'm about ninety-five percent sure I'd have to give it a complete rewrite, plus my characterization has shifted enough in the intervening years that, well...yeah.

Anyway, I'll be posting it in seven parts over the next week, about 10K a day, with minimal edits as I find things that don't quite work for me as I go through adding HTML. Even though I didn't do major edits, thanks to my betas from 2009: harpers_child, ineptshieldmaid, westingturtle, and ceirseach; sorry this didn't actually turn into anything, guys.

The last of the UFOs for now! I'm reasonably certain this is the most recent, since the last datestamp on it is August 2009. We first saw Fiorenza Paolucci in Four Things Greater, of course; this is another Fiorenza POV, and it was written after aella_irene and I wrote the bulk of the Junior Pevensie verse (houseofpevensie), so there are bits and pieces of that in there as well. (Namedropping more than anything else, as this still falls firmly within the limits of the Warsverse rather than the JP 'verse.) In timeline it falls shortly after Landslide. (And, for a change, this one I can date fairly well, since it's right after Peter/Susan becomes fairly quiet common knowledge.)

Stylistically Over the Hills probably would have been most like Four Things Greater and The Coastwise Lights, both of which feature action plots and OC narrators. (And were actually both written within a few months of each other, heh. Though Coastwise was when I started slowing down as a writer, if I remember correctly, because not long after that I believe aella_irene and I started working on our original.) The title is from Over the Hills and Far Away, of course, specifically the version from Sharpe.

I have notes this time! Mostly on world-building; there's a bit in here that hasn't really made it into the rest of the Warsverse, like Liobsynde Fara's people, the Lothaire tribes of the North. I think they're nomadic, and by the time of Dust they've either moved further west or joined in with the High Reaches tribes. More importantly there's further mention of the Marsh-Wiggles and the Bog People. The Marsh-Wiggles are canon, of course; I believe the Bog People are first mentioned in The Crafting of Narnia as fighting on the White Witch's side, and aren't actually book canon. But I liked the idea of them, so I, er, borrowed them, and they have a running mention throughout the Warsverse as being in constant conflict with the Marsh-Wiggles; the most recent time they've been mentioned was in Dust 24. So at some point we may actually see them. (Over The Hills was going to be that story. Clearly didn't happen.)

Anyway, Over The Hills was going to be one of those stories where there is a lovely action plot and Narnia kicks some ass and the OCs are awesome and there is world-building, which is about all I know. Also now I'm listening to the Sharpe soundtrack and wishing that I could get my hands on the DVDs, or, er, ahem. Wow, my attention span is fragmented right now. I'm going to stop now before I say something even madder.

Oh, hey, as an exercise: there were far fewer italics in here than a lot of my other UFOs. I was improving!

More early fic! This is a Peter POV of Once More for the Ages, which was written in June 2008. If I remember correctly, I started writing Legend the first couple weeks of my freshman year of university, in my fits and starts of homesickness and despair and general teenage angst. There's a lot of my Narnia angst in this one. It's heavy on the Golden Age Narnia/Telmarine Narnia differences, and on what was lost after the White Stag. (Also, bonus excerpt from Tumnus's diary, I'd forgotten that was in there.)

Ah. "Once More for the Ages" is Peter/Caspian, but I stopped working on Legend before it got there. As there's an alternate POV, I guess I don't have to say how it ends! Once again, damn, but I was heavy on the italics back in the day.

I must have been really close to posting Tuesday at some point, because it's already coded, and I don't go through and add HTML formatting until right before I post. *hands* It's virtually done, I just don't really like the ending very much, and I now have slight problems with the characterization -- which is why I started rewriting it at one point, "Bad Moon Rising" would have been the same story completely rewritten from the beginning, but I stalled out.

Chronologically, it probably takes place slightly before How High the River Rises, since there are mentions of Narnia's money problems. (Wait! I just found an age marker which puts Peter at 20, so around five or six years in.) The most important thing to know is that in this story, Peter fights off ninjas. Naked.

Not really sure I have any notes to add. I think this was the only fic I wrote where one of Peter's lovers actually does try to kill him, though it's a running joke in the Warsverse that half the people Peter sleeps with try and murder him. He comes out in this story a little more messed up than I really prefer him to be, or at least messed up in different ways. One important thing Tuesday sets up is Coello's treason, which comes up again in other stories. (Or at least I think it does, I can't remember anything off the top of my head where it does appear.)

This one is pretty short -- it's not the one that came up with the next highest number of votes, but I don't feel like going through and formatting Tuesday, so! Susan killing people it is.

The premise for "How High the River Rises" was pretty simple, which is one of the reasons it never went very far. I think the basic idea comes through pretty well at the beginning. Dating on this -- mmm, early Golden Age, probably. Somewhere in the first five years, probably? It doesn't have any particular date markers within the text, so I'm not entirely sure. Writing-wise, it post-dates the beginning of Dust; you can tell by all the econ stuff at the beginning. I think I probably started it in 2010? Maybe 2009, but probably last year. As usual, further notes at the end.

This was seriously just going to go on with Susan sneaking through the castle and killing people, silently. I have no idea why she doesn't just steal a horse and escape. Thus why it never got finished; the whole premise of it was Susan, killing people in the shadows! And that gets old even for me. (And I didn't even finish the last sentence, I added the period on the end of "spanned" as I was formatting it. Er.)

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's a U(nfinished) F(ic) O(bject)! For the purposes of this exercise, I am borrowing knitting parlance, because why the hell not.

Timber and Tuesday ended up tying in the poll, but I had one vote for Timber over on LJ which edged it out, so Timber it is! Some notes to start, first, and then a few more at the end.

"Old Timber to New Fires" is one of the older WIPs in my Narnia folder; it dates back to the summer of 2008 and in some ways it shows, as it lacks some of the things I might have put in had I written it later. (A lot of the strays, for one -- although chronologically it postdates Fiorenza Paolucci's arrival in Narnia, it was written before she or some of the other well-known strays were conceived of, and so they're not mentioned, when otherwise they would be.) It has a number of references to events that come up fairly often in my Pevensie stuff, but which I've never written out specifically -- Edmund time-traveling back to the Great Autumn, and most significantly the time Peter lost his memory and spent a year with the mercenary company the Red Company, which is probably the most emotionally significant bit in here, in some ways, aside from Caspian's trauma.

I like it because there are some really lovely moments in here -- I was in full-on angst "lo how has Narnia fallen" mode when I wrote this, and that shows through Caspian's eyes. We also see a lot more of the smaller western countries than we do probably anywhere else, and get a taste for how much Narnia is really embroiled in war during the Golden Age. But it ended up getting stalled out because I didn't really know where I wanted to go with it.

And some more notes: And after this it probably would have gone to Cair Paravel, where there would have been Susan and Lucy and a really lovely party, and then an assassination attempt, because that's how you throw a party in Golden Age Narnia. And then I have no idea where it would have gone. Presumably Caspian would have gone back to his own time, since for him, this pre-dates VotDT.

Also, you have no idea how freaking many italics I took out of this when I was formatting it to post. Two or three years ago Lass betaed something for me (Voices, actually), and she said something along the lines of, "You have so many italics, it's too much trouble to say de-italicize it, I'm just going to say 'de-it'." AND HALF OF ALL THE RED IN THE BETA SAID "DE-IT." I am so glad I'm not so crazy with the italics anymore, and there's still more in here than I'd write today.

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Too big to crosspost, so if you like, you can comment on the LJ link-post here, though I'd prefer to keep everything on DW.